Antecedents
by Charis M
Summary: 'Life has shown her what being Anne gets her, and she refuses to be that woman ever again. (Life has shown her that being Milady gets her no better.)' And so she comes to this. [Milady, through the years. Spoilers for the entirety of the show.]
**Antecedents
**

 _There are spoilers for the entirety of Season 3 in this. This is your only warning.  
_

 _That fic I wrote while trying to make sense of where (how?) Milady ended up at the end of Season 3. (Or: not at all the fic I set out to write.)_

 _Title by way of Maggie O'Farrell:_ We are all ... just vessels through which identities pass [...] We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

* * *

She'd had another name once, before Anne, but it is a name that belongs to a girl who knows more of the darkness of the world than any child should, who learns early that the world does no favours to its forgotten children - who learns that the world will give you nothing, and is far more likely to try to take. Those who do give always want something, she discovers; it is a painful lesson to learn how to distinguish those who only wish to soothe their souls from those who are looking for more, and when it is better to avoid the latter than to give in.

She'd had another name once but she put it aside when she met Athos, because the girl recognised the kind of man he was and the chance he represented and knew she had to be someone else to seize that. She'd had another name, but she lost it in the feel of the grass under her feet and the wind in her hair, in a full belly and a peaceful night's sleep, in the way he looked at her and the unexpected tangle of emotions that rose in its wake. (She'd had another name, but she'd left that girl in the gutter, blinded by a dream.)

Thomas was not her first.

Growing up in the underbelly of the city, she had killed before - an instinctual lashing out, born of desperation and a need to survive. There had been blood on her hands before she'd ever met the de la Fère sons (before killing one and being killed by the other), but she'd hoped, dreamed, with an unexpected naïveté, that her marriage would mean the end of those darker days. (She had been a fool to believe she could leave the girl she'd been behind.)

Milady de Winter is born in the spring, baptised in blood and shattered innocence and the last tears she thinks she will ever shed. Milady de Winter is arms, armour, exactly who she needs to be in order to survive, even before Richelieu finds her and teaches her other, harder lessons. She takes that English word to her heart, to her bones, becomes frost sheathing fire and pushes away the gentle dreams, for they will do her no good here (and those dreams are dead, dead as the girl who had thought they might one day be true, dead as she must be in order to endure, and she has no time for them).

But he falls, and she falls, and everything upends and she is left scrabbling for her footing once more - left shattered, vulnerable, uncertain and furious and hollow all at once, until she realises -

Surviving is not enough. She wants to be more than this marionette she's become, forever at the mercy of the men in power who tug at her strings. She _wants_ , and it threatens to destroy her.

(The way Athos looks at her, in the unguarded moments when he thinks she does not see, rouses the dreams beneath the ice.)

Surviving is not enough, but she does not know what else to do; she cannot be forever waiting to dangle from some man's hands, but she does not know what to be. She'd thought she wanted to become Anne again but life has shown her what being Anne - betrayed, unwanted, broken, _killed_ \- gets her, and she refuses to be that woman ever again. (Life has shown her that being Milady gets her no better. Life has taught her that even when a woman lashes out first, before the wounds that seem more and more inexorable are dealt, there are no solutions.)

And yet she returns to Paris in the end - perhaps because it is familiar, perhaps out of some forlorn hope. She returns knowing that she will bleed again (because she is no fool, and the importance of keeping her eyes and ears open was a lesson she learned even before her hands were first stained), and if she tells herself she does not know why then it is as much truth as lie, for though there is a part of her that needs that clean break (how can she learn who she is, when a part of her that she cannot quash even now is still Anne) she cannot claim that is the only reason.

"Your only value is as an assassin," she is told, and she wants to laugh aloud because this is a man who should know better, a man who had seen more of Richelieu's doings than almost any other, a man who knows full well what she is capable of (who has _seen_ it) and yet refuses to see in her anything but the worst of that man who had done so much in the name of France. _What would you think of me,_ she wonders, unable to silence the bitter question, _if I were one of your men instead,_ but she knows the answer and does not bother to ask. It will hardly be the first time she has killed for the crown; she learned long ago that for a woman there is no honour in such a task, but she cares nothing for honour.

(Another lie, and another truth.)

And after everything, what is the crown to her? It has given and taken away by turns, all unheeding, and in that it is no more and no less than anything, any _one_ else in her life. It is a means to an end; she has no illusions that actions she commits in the crown's name are somehow more pure - one lesson that Richelieu had never succeeded in teaching her - but she has long since learned the value of pragmatism.

(Perhaps she is what they have all made her; perhaps the Church is right and she was born a child of sin and sin is the only end she could come to. She does not dwell on it, most days. Her work keeps her too busy for introspection, and the truth is unimportant.)

France, Spain, England, the Continent beyond - she comes and goes, wears a hundred faces and names, dirties her hands and does not fool herself into thinking them washed clean by the crown's tacit acceptance of her decisions. There are arguments, sometimes, whether because she has chosen to kill or because she spares a life, but she has her reasons and they are (eventually, sometimes grudgingly) accepted. (The worst they can do is kill her, when she knows too much of secrets for any other possible end; it is an oddly liberating thing to realise, but she has remembered that there is more to life than survival.)

A hundred faces and a thousand names and she loses herself in them, forgets, _lives_ , finds a little piece of herself in each and every one - hoards those pieces greedily in the secret fastness of her heart for her _someday_ , begins to puzzle together who she wishes to be without the expectations of others. She does not want clean hands, does not want lies and misdirections, does not want another's bed or name or life, just a freedom the girl who'd only killed for fear had never known.

It's not about being Anne again.

(She realises it never had been.)

* * *

 _To be scrupulously honest: I have watched approximately two minutes of Season 3, and it was a very calculated segment (and I do not think i will watch any more of it), but I am fairly thoroughly spoiled. As such, any inconsistencies with canon are wholly mine and equally accidental. (Not watching it has still given me plenty of very strong feelings regarding how it handled Milady, hence this fic. Oops?)  
_

 _As always, you can find me as myalchod over at Tumblr, with an open inbox and IM and general willingness to chat while I swear at my work. XD_


End file.
